A Preliminary User’s Guide to the “Early Modern” Tool in Ottomanist Scholarship

The “early modern” categorization resembles the Indo-European Language Family, introduced by the British philologist William Jones in the late eighteenth century: It is obviously a European imperialist construct, yet it has undeniable heuristic value. For scholars of non-European empires, “early modern” comes with a great deal of baggage. It reflects our eagerness to demonstrate that the societies we study were just as sophisticated as their Western European counterparts, and that we ourselves are just as theoretically sophisticated as our Europeanist colleagues. In the Ottoman field, recent publications have stressed that the Ottomans, beginning in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, had political institutions and sensibilities—absolutist, constitutionalist—similar to those present in Western Europe at the time.

The Ottomans themselves did not name trends or eras in this fashion, preferring instead to emphasize the reigns of individual sultans or, on the other hand, legendary heroes; landmark conquests; epochal population movements; and, of course, critical points in the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the history of the original Muslim community.¹ They were, however, masters at naming cataclysmic events, often with disarming understatement: The Edirne Incident (Edirne vakası), the Auspicious Incident (vaka-i hayriye), and so on. And of course, they named two major reform initiatives—the Nizam-ı Cedid and the Tanzimat—whose names serve historians as synonyms for a new, “modern” reformist era.

Early Modern vs. “Decline”

By the Ottomans’ own logic, then, “early modern” might imply a budding awareness that reform was necessary or desirable. The first champions of early modernity, then, would be the intellectuals once known as “decline writers,” beginning, arguably, with Süleyman I’s grand vizier Lütfi Pasha (term 1539–41) and continuing through the members of Selim III’s (r. 1789–1807) court who penned the reform proposals that launched the Nizam-ı Cedid. In this sense, the “early modern” concept subverts the “decline” paradigm while linking the nineteenth-century modernizing reforms to earlier precursors. At the same time, “early modern” offers an alternative to declinist periodizations such as “post-classical” and “post-Süleymanic.”

Comparisons

In addition to providing temporal linkages, the “early modern” paradigm allows for comparisons between the Ottoman Empire and contemporary regimes elsewhere in the world: not just in Western Europe but in Central, South, and East Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, even the Americas. If “early modern” applies to the Ottoman Empire, then it should, by all rights, apply to these other non-Western European regions. Even if the terminology originates in European historical scholarship, it can be appropriated by scholars of these other polities, provided they remain conscious of the Europeanist assumptions inherent in it. Nascent reformist sensibilities might be one point of comparison among regimes in these different regions, as might decentralization and political participation by a range of social groups.

Globalization

In European historiography, “early modern” implies cosmopolitanism and even globalization inasmuch as “Europe united the world” with the so-called voyages of discovery of the late fifteenth century. Even though this Eurocentric presentation of events is largely passé, the “early modern” paradigm can still signal a newfound interconnectedness among different parts of the globe, very much including the Ottoman Empire, at roughly this time. The Ottomans’ territorial expansion gave them unprecedented access to international markets while steady monetization of the Ottoman economy facilitated trade with far-flung and not-so-far-flung regions. Ottoman importation of Yemeni coffee, Indian cottons and spices, English woolens, Chinese porcelain, and American tobacco belong to this new era of globalization. Globalization had its drawbacks, of course. It triggered a massive influx of Spanish American silver into the Ottoman economy, exacerbating a nascent inflationary trend. It also led provincial governors intent on controlling regional trade to amass private armies of mercenaries, contributing to the Celali rebellions that rocked Anatolia and northern Syria during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Framed by this new paradigm, the crisis of the seventeenth century emerges as early modern growing pains rather than a fall from an imagined golden age of grace.

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